Politics

Harvard Lawyer Destroys NYT Editorial On Legal Immigration

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Rachel Stoltzfoos Staff Reporter
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Harvard lawyer and conservative writer John Hinderaker poked all kinds of holes in the logic of the New York Times editorial board this week, after it published a piece criticizing Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions’ argument that legal immigration should be slowed.

In a time when most Republicans wouldn’t dare say they oppose legal immigration, Mr. Sessions, in the words of the Times, chooses “instead to echo an uglier time in our history, when nativists wielded the spurious argument that the more immigrants taken in by America, the worse off America is,” the board wrote in an editorial Wednesday.

“He’s advocating for ‘slowing the pace’ of legal immigration, supposedly to increase job opportunities for native-born, low-skilled workers, particularly African-Americans,” the board wrote. (RELATED: Activists Unite To Turn Illegal Immigrants Into Democratic Voters)

In a scathing rebuke, Hinderaker challenged the idea that unlimited immigration is good for the economy, and took the board to task for omitting obvious facts and fallacies in the open borders argument.

From his post on Power Line:

“The Times never acknowledges the body of social science research that documents the negative impact of low-skilled immigration on working class Americans. And the editorialists think it is ridiculous to believe that admitting tens of millions of immigrants has any effect on schools, hospitals and other community resources. They must not read their own newspaper, so how about some first-hand experience? Let’s send a a million or two million immigrants to the Hamptons and see whether schools and hospitals are affected. That is probably what it would take for the paper’s dim-witted editorialists to notice.”

The real question is not whether some new jobs would be created by the immigrants coming in, but how a surge would affect the per capita incomes of existing American citizens, he adds, which is at the heart of Sessions’ argument.

“The percentage of the country that is foreign-born is on track to rapidly eclipse any previous historical peak and to continue rising,” Sessions wrote in the Washington Post op-ed last week, noting a Census Bureau estimate that another 14 million immigrants will come legally to the U.S. in the next ten years. “Imagine the pressure this will put on wages, as well as schools, hospitals and many other community resources.”

He called for a moderated pace of legal immigration for the sake of higher wages, smaller welfare rolls and time for assimilation. (RELATED: Obama Guides More Foreign Workers Into US Job Market)

“It is not mainstream, but extreme, to continue surging immigration beyond any historical precedent and to do so at a time when almost 1 in 4 Americans age 25 to 54 does not have a job,” he wrote.

Update: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified Hinderaker as a “Dartmouth layer.” Hinderaker is a Dartmouth alumnus, but graduated from Harvard Law School.

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